Say Nothing

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  The flat was decorated with multiple photographs of Hughes’s hero, Che Guevara: pictures of Che laughing, smoking, drinking coffee. Hughes felt warmly towards these iconic images, yet they also functioned as a taunt. Che had had what you might argue was the good fortune of being martyred when he was still young. He was not yet forty when he was executed by the Bolivian army, in 1967, his skin still smooth, his beard untinged by grey. But Hughes was also stuck with the feeling that, whereas Che’s revolution in Cuba had succeeded, the revolution that Hughes and Gerry Adams had undertaken in Northern Ireland had failed.

  To Hughes, Good Friday had symbolised the ultimate concession: formal acceptance by the republican movement that the British would remain in Ireland. Hughes had killed people. He had done so with the conviction that he was fighting for a united Ireland. But it now became clear to him that the leadership of the movement may have been prepared to settle for less than absolute victory and had elected – deliberately, in his view – not to inform soldiers like him. For Hughes, this strategic sleight of hand was deeply personal: he placed the blame directly on his dearest comrade, Gerry Adams. A framed photograph hung on one wall in his flat, alongside the tributes to Che. It was an old snapshot, taken at Long Kesh during the 1970s, of Hughes and Adams with their arms around each other. Adams wore a big splayed collar and shaggy locks that hung around his shoulders; Hughes wore a tight white T-shirt that said MELBOURNE IRISH CLUB. Both of them were grinning, against a backdrop of barbed wire. Hughes no longer had any love for Adams, but he kept the picture on the wall, to remind him of the way things had once been. For decades he had shared an intimate bond with Adams, but it was never a relationship of equals. Lately he had taken to joking, darkly, that, like the weapons of the IRA, he had been used and then discarded – ‘decommissioned’.

  Hughes was increasingly anxious. The man who had engineered Bloody Friday now avoided crowded areas of central Belfast. He liked Divis Tower because he found comfort in its architecture of parameters: like a prison cell, it was an insular space that he could control. He found a measure of temporary relief in alcohol. His doctor told him to stop drinking, but he couldn’t.

  Brendan Hughes in his flat in Divis Tower (Press Eye)

  Mackers still remembered when he first met Hughes. At the time, Mackers was only sixteen. Hughes came into Long Kesh as a famous figure. He was a decade older than Mackers, but he took a liking to the younger man, and the two became close friends. In conducting his interviews, Mackers had found that, for former paramilitaries, the experience of speaking after decades of silence could be profoundly cathartic. It was sometimes hard to get his subjects to start talking. But once they started, it was often difficult to get them to stop. Years of war stories and terrifying experiences and hysterical jokes and private grievances came tumbling out. Mackers was a sympathetic listener, murmuring encouragement, rewarding humour with sincere and raucous laughter, and volunteering the occasional personal anecdote of his own. He would punctuate his questions by saying, ‘Could you fill out for the future students of Boston some detail on that for me?’

  Just as Ed Moloney had predicted, the fact that Mackers knew so many of the players – had lived alongside them, carried out operations with them, gone to prison with them – endowed him with a particular credibility. Over a series of interviews, Hughes and Mackers would sit in the flat, smoking and talking. At one point Hughes joked that he wanted Boston College to pay for his cigarettes for the rest of his life. Then, when he got cancer, he would turn around and sue the university. They spoke about Hughes’s childhood, about how his father coped after his mother died, about his travels with the merchant navy, his awakening as a socialist, the hundreds of operations he had masterminded, and the long years in prison. They spoke about Bloody Friday. ‘There was no intention to kill people that day,’ Hughes insisted, adding, ‘I have a great deal of regret about that.’

  But above all, Hughes talked about Gerry Adams. Mackers had overlapped with Adams at Long Kesh, and he understood the close bond that Adams and Hughes had enjoyed. But now Hughes was filled with anger towards his erstwhile compatriot. Hughes hated the Good Friday Agreement. He joked that GFA, the acronym by which the accord had become known, actually stood for Got Fuck All. ‘What the fuck was it for?’ he would ask. The lives he had taken, the young volunteers he had sent to die: his understanding of those sacrifices had always been that they would ultimately be justified by the emergence of a united Ireland. Instead, Adams had become a well-heeled statesman, a peacemaker; he had positioned himself for a prominent role in a post-conflict Northern Ireland. To his supporters, Adams was a historic figure, a visionary, a plausible candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. But it seemed to Hughes that Gerry Adams might have been duped by his own ambition – or, worse, manipulated by the British. In prison, when the Provos conducted educational workshops on strategy, one fundamental lesson was that a central pillar of Britain’s approach to counterinsurgency was ‘to mould leaderships whom they could deal with’. Hughes believed that in the aftermath of the peace agreement, Adams might have unwittingly allowed himself to be moulded in just this manner.

  One burden of command, in any armed conflict, is that the senior officer is obliged to make choices that may get subordinates killed. Hughes was traumatised by the orders he had given to send young volunteers – and innocent civilians – to their deaths. He replayed these events on a loop in his head. On Bloody Friday, he told Mackers, he had been the man on the ground. But it was Adams who was calling the shots. ‘Gerry was the man who made the decisions,’ he said.

  By denying that he had ever played a role in the conflict, Adams was, in effect, absolving himself of any moral responsibility for catastrophes like Bloody Friday – and, in the process, disowning his one-time subordinates, like Brendan Hughes. ‘I’m disgusted with the whole thing,’ Hughes said. ‘It means that people like myself … have to carry the responsibility of all those deaths.’ If all that carnage had at least succeeded in forcing the British out of Ireland, then Hughes might be able to justify, to himself, the actions he had taken. But he felt robbed of any such rationale for absolution. ‘As everything has turned out,’ he said, ‘not one death was worth it.’

  Even as Hughes contended with these demons, he was struck by the fact that Adams appeared to be completely free of any such painful introspection. He seemed, instead, to glide along from one photo opportunity to the next, like a man who was not in any way shackled by his own past. It maddened Hughes. Of course he was in the IRA! ‘Everybody knows it,’ he told Mackers. ‘The British know it. The people on the street know it. The dogs know it on the street. And he’s standing there denying it.’

  Hughes may have seemed to possess credentials, as a veteran of the armed struggle, that would render him unimpeachable in republican circles. But when he refused to endorse the peace process and drifted apart from Adams, Sinn Féin, with its fetish for conformity, proceeded to shun him. It humiliated Hughes to be living on public benefits and to see others – people ‘who never fired a shot’, people who were ‘never actually involved in the revolution but hung on to the aprons of dead volunteers’ – establishing themselves as power brokers in post-war Belfast. He grumbled that Adams and his cohort seemed to be enjoying a lavish lifestyle that was at odds with their ostensible politics as revolutionary socialists. He called them ‘the Armani suit brigade’.

  Hughes worried, also, that the armed struggle was now being sanitised and reified, turned into a bumper sticker. The republican movement had always venerated its martyrs, but it seemed to Hughes as though some of those martyrs, who were still alive and struggling from the after-effects of their contributions, were now being cast aside, upstaged by their own portraits in graffiti. ‘Painting murals on walls to commemorate blanket men after they have died a slow and lonely death from alcohol abuse is no use to anyone,’ he would say. ‘I would hate for young people now to have this romanticised version of the events of that time.’ He added, ‘The truth is so very far
removed from that and I suppose I’m living proof.’

  It had not taken long for word to reach Adams of his old comrade’s disloyalty. In 2000, the two men met, and Adams challenged Hughes about why he had chosen to go public with his criticism, questioning him about some of the people he had been associating with and saying, as Hughes remembered it, ‘that I had got myself into bad company and I should get myself out of it’. Hughes felt that this overture was an effort to censor him. It only intensified his resentment. At one point, Hughes discovered a listening device in his flat: a small black microphone. There was a time when such a device would almost certainly have been planted by the British military. But now he was convinced that it had been installed there by the IRA.

  This sense of disillusionment was a theme in other interviews that Mackers conducted. One of his subjects was Ricky O’Rawe, a compact man in his late forties who had shared a prison cell with Hughes and been a close friend of Bobby Sands’s. During the 1981 hunger strike, O’Rawe had served as the lead spokesman for the strikers. When Mackers first approached O’Rawe and told him about the Belfast Project, O’Rawe was reluctant to participate. As it happened, he had been nursing a dark secret for two decades, and he worried that if he spoke about his experiences in the IRA, the secret might slip out. But eventually Mackers persuaded O’Rawe to talk, and he started coming over to his house in the evenings with his recorder. The initial interviews were anodyne. O’Rawe spoke about his family history, how his father had been an IRA man in the 1940s, how he had grown up singing rebel songs and joined the Provos himself when he was still a teenager. O’Rawe talked about how he was interned on the Maidstone, alongside Gerry Adams, and about how he once conducted a ‘freelance’ robbery to score some money for booze. His IRA masters punished him by shooting him in the legs – a penalty that he felt, on balance, was entirely justified. Mackers and O’Rawe were doing an interview when the news broke that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, in New York. Both men were horrified. If either of them saw any affinity between the Irish tradition of political violence and the mass murder of Al Qaeda, they did not dwell on it.

  ‘I’m not going to talk about the hunger strike,’ O’Rawe told Mackers on a number of occasions. And for the first eight interviews, he didn’t. But on the night of their final interview, the subject came up and O’Rawe found himself sharing the one story he had promised himself he would hold back.

  In the summer of 1981, after Bobby Sands and three other hunger strikers had died, O’Rawe was helping to lead the negotiations from inside the prison. According to O’Rawe, the prisoners received a secret offer from Margaret Thatcher that would have granted almost all their demands. It wasn’t a complete capitulation, but it guaranteed that they would be able to wear their own clothes – one of their chief requirements – as well as other key concessions. O’Rawe and another negotiator smuggled a message to the Provo leadership outside the prison, indicating that they were inclined to accept the British offer and call an end to the strike. But word came back from the outside – specifically, from Gerry Adams – that what Thatcher was proposing was not enough, so the strikers should hold out.

  Six more men died before the strike concluded. The public narrative had always maintained that it was the prisoners themselves who insisted on persevering with the strike, and O’Rawe had never spoken out to question this version of history, deferring to what he came to think of as the ‘carefully scripted myths’ that had solidified around these dramatic events. But privately, he felt enormous guilt for not standing up at the time and being more forceful. He wondered why Adams and those around him would have sustained the strike rather than take an offer that the men on the inside had been prepared to accept.

  Over years of private rumination, O’Rawe began to develop an awful theory. When Bobby Sands ran for his parliamentary seat, the spectacle of a peaceful protester seeking public office engendered popular support for republicanism on a scale that the IRA had never achieved through violence. After Sands died, on 5 May 1981, as many as a hundred thousand people took to the streets. O’Rawe wasn’t privy to the discussions of the Army Council, which made the decision; but he came to believe that Adams had deliberately perpetuated the hunger strike in order to capitalise on the broad-based sympathy and support that it produced. In terms of republican policy, the hunger strike was the moment that ‘split the atom’, O’Rawe concluded. For the first time, Adams saw the potential for change through electoral politics. In prolonging the strike, he recognised an unprecedented opportunity to dramatically expand the support base for the republican movement. It only cost six lives.

  Once O’Rawe started telling Mackers the story, he found that he could not stop. He began to cry, choking up at first, then bawling uncontrollably like a child. For twenty years, he had been walking around with the weight of those six dead strikers on his conscience, and after two decades of silence he felt purged, emotionally, to be talking about it. ‘I don’t give a fuck any more, this is coming out,’ he told Mackers. ‘Guys died here for fucking nothing!’

  But when he reflected on the notion that Adams might have cynically determined that a steady supply of martyrs was indispensable in launching Sinn Féin as a viable political party, O’Rawe was forced to concede a jarring possibility: were it not for that decision, the war might never have ended. As Ed Moloney subsequently wrote, ‘The hunger strike made Sinn Féin’s successful excursion into electoral politics possible: the subsequent tension between the IRA’s armed struggle and Sinn Féin’s politics produced the peace process and ultimately the end of the conflict. Had the offer of July 1981 not been undermined, it is possible, even probable, that none of this would have happened. There will be those who will say that the end justified the means, that the achievement of peace was a pearl whose price was worth paying.’ To O’Rawe it seemed that anyone capable of playing such a long and calculating game and dispatching six men to an unnecessary death must be a genius of political strategy – but also a sociopath.

  Brendan Hughes nurtured his own survivor’s guilt when it came to the hunger strikes, and he dwelt on it in his interviews with Mackers. Hughes often thought about the initial, abortive strike, which he had called off after the young striker Sean McKenna slipped into a coma. Playing a similar game of if/then counterfactuals, Hughes would consider what might have happened had he just allowed McKenna to die. Could the second strike have been prevented altogether? Could that have saved the lives of ten men? He ran the arithmetic in his head. It could be overwhelming. At one point, long after the strike, Hughes bumped into McKenna in Dundalk. McKenna had brain damage, and his eyesight had been permanently affected by the strike. ‘Fuck you, Dark,’ McKenna said to Hughes. ‘You should have let me die.’

  There were times when Hughes thought about killing himself. Like McKenna, he bore physical scars from the strike. Eventually, his eyesight would start to go. He took to wearing an eye patch, which gave him the piratical appearance of an outlaw in winter. He would sit in his flat and stare for hours out of the window, chain-smoking, gazing at the jagged lines of the city, the schoolyards and church steeples, and, in the distance, the shipyards, where a century earlier the Titanic had been built. It seemed to Carrie Twomey, Mackers’s wife, that Hughes was stuck there. ‘I always got the sense that he lived a large part of his life in that windowsill,’ she recalled. ‘He couldn’t commit to either jump out and end it all or jump back in and start really living.’

  ‘I have a clear image now of the prison hospital,’ Hughes told Mackers at one point. ‘I can still smell the – there is a smell when you die, there’s a death smell – and it hung over the hospital the whole period during the hunger strike. And I still have recurring thoughts of that. I can even smell it sometimes, that stale death smell. And for years, I mean, I couldn’t have spoke like this a few years ago. I couldn’t. I wasn’t able to do it. I put it out of my head.’

  Hughes recalled Dr Ross, the kind physician who had tended to him during his hunger s
trike and brought him fresh water collected from a mountain spring. Bobby Sands had never trusted Ross. He called him a ‘mind manipulator’. But the doctor’s kindness had meant a lot to Hughes. Later, he learned that after watching all ten men die in the hunger strike, Dr Ross had taken his own life, with a shotgun, in 1986.

  Hughes acknowledged to Mackers that there was a level of candour he could adopt in these conversations because he knew that the interviews would be sealed until his death. He told Mackers that Gerry Adams had authorised the bombing mission to London in 1973, the mission that ended up putting Dolours Price and her fellow bombers behind bars. ‘I mean, there’s things that you can say and things you can’t say,’ he reflected. ‘I’m not going to stand up on a platform and say I was involved in the shooting of a soldier or involved in the planning of operations in England. But I’m certainly not going to stand up and deny it. And to hear people who I would have died for, and almost did on a few occasions, stand up and deny the part in history that he has played – the part in the war that he has played, the part in the war that he directed – and deny it is totally disgusting and a disgrace to all the people who have died.’

  Hughes remembered Pat McClure, ‘Wee Pat’, and his clandestine squad, the Unknowns, in which Dolours Price had served. McClure ended up disappearing during the 1980s. He had dropped out of active service at some point and gone to work driving a black taxi. Someone asked him if he would go back, to fight the long war. But McClure said no. He was done. Hughes heard that he emigrated to Canada and died there. If it was McClure who had day-to-day command of the Unknowns, Mackers asked, who had ultimate authority for the unit? Who was giving the orders?